A L A V A B igraphs er A S R dition S I G N Limited E A H E J Limited Edition Serigraphs JEHANGIR SABAVALA ublished by P The Serigraph Studio presents Limited Edition Serigraphs by JEHANGIR SABAVALA 2008 Experiences of Grace, States of Illumination: The Paintings of Jehangir Sabavala Ranjit Hoskote portfolio is, literally, a collection of leaves that you can several decades, a privilege that has informed the critical carry with you. The word is veined with the pleasures biography and the retrospective study of Sabavala that I have Aof selecting a favourite image, dwelling on an published, as well as the lifetime retrospective of his work that intriguing detail, juxtaposing images from different periods in I curated for the National Gallery of Modern Art. To view this an artist’s career to produce a visual narrative that is richly distinguished artist in the amplitude of his painterly journey is multi-dimensional. Like a miniature retrospective, a suite of to bear witness to sixty years of questing. Sabavala has never limited edition serigraphs such as the present one, can been the hostage of fashion, the voice of ideology or the represent the entire gamut of an artist’s contribution and evoke tactician of political necessity. At his own measured pace, the span of his artistic career. The images that comprise this working a lode on his own, without reference to schools, groups selection demonstrate the inner logic of Jehangir Sabavala’s and movements, he has logged in a graceful progression from aesthetic development and the changing nature of his one key theme to the next, one formal discovery to another. responses to the complexities of self, society, ethnic ancestry The art of his maturity holds within it the reflexes of his and artistic context. A prominent member of the first apprenticeship to the grand tradition of European art and his generation of postcolonial Indian artists, Sabavala is one of the training in the dominant styles of modernism, as well as the pioneers who first developed a painterly idiom that was attuned experience of passing through periods of meticulous self- to the international languages of art-making yet sensitive to questioning and the testing of alternatives. the textures of local culture and visual capability. Sabavala’s handling of the primary elements of light, colour The present images stand in an intriguing relationship to the and texture has changed, at first almost imperceptibly and then paintings on which they are based: they are not exact more dramatically, over the decades. The hard, even reproductions, but have been slightly modified by the artist aggressively definite and form-enclosing line of his early work through digital means, in consultation with the Serigraph has given way to suffusions of radiance that hint at the Studio, the final images being produced by the screen-printing openness and limitless expanse of the infinite. The relationship technique. The accelerated growth of the Indian art market between glazed surface and underlying structure has been during the last few years, welcome as it is from an economic as determined, variously, by the rigours of pictorial grammar and well as a cultural viewpoint, has tended to put the works of the impulse towards fantasia. His early bright palette has modern masters like Sabavala beyond the reach of many yielded before subtle, fractured tonalities; the schematic serious collectors. In such a situation, initiatives such as this evocation of the actual scene has been transmuted into the limited edition serve to present a novel form of image, to shimmering reverie, the imagined vista. And once again, in amplify the ongoing conversation about Indian art, and to recent years, he has turned to brilliant colour, hard-edged expand the collector base that sustains this domain of image- figures, the interplay of angle, plane, shimmer and destiny. making activity. Through all these changes, Sabavala’s paintings have preserved an introspective, melancholy lyricism, as well as the ache of the Sublime. These paintings are tinted by a nostalgia, as for moments once possessed, for homelands once known The magic of Jehangir Sabavala’s art remains inexhaustible; and now forever beyond the horizon of what can be known. and I can say this with some authority, having known his art for Such is the aura that plays around the edges of Sabavala’s 3 works, evoking in the viewer an awareness of transient beauty academic art to which it subscribed; in Leger’s Utopian world- across the years, and has scrupulously preserved the books wonderment in the face of the world which imparts to our lives and imminent epiphany. There is, in each successive phase of view, it embodied the transfiguration of the spirit through that he maintains for visitors’ remarks during every exhibition). whatever ultimate meaning they have. He appreciates the Sabavala’s career, a persistence of earlier concerns: an technological progress and perfect design. Sabavala was And finally, a location, in cultural terms, for his displaced self: mystical experience, without losing the sceptical edge of anticipation of future consummations; an emancipation of attracted, not to the residual ideological content of Cubism, but this would involve a deep analysis of motive and position; it reason. trapped possibilities; a patterning of departures. to its formal discipline. Cubism ingrained in him a firm would mean an acceptance and even a joyous embracing of the After the mid-1960s, Sabavala summons forth a procession of appreciation of light and structure; but it constrained him as he romanticism of deep, rich, warm tropical colour, without a exiles and pilgrims in his paintings; and as they traverse the forged ahead and grew into an acceptance of a deep-seated renunciation of the crystalline classical grasp of structure; it unbounded distances towards a once and future homeland, he classicising tendency within himself. The truth is that he was would allow Sabavala to engage with harbour and marketplace traces the stations of their quest. We have here the tragic Sabavala belongs to a family that is legendary for its patronage never, as some observers believe, a Cubist; he adapted the and streetside, without having to abandon the mountain, the vision of a spiritual homelessness; at the zenith of its calm of the arts in Bombay; he marked a piquant innovation within style for his own purposes, and it became one among the cloud and the watershed. In other words, it has been grief, it approaches and turns over into its opposite, a its ranks, as a young man, by choosing to become a tributaries that nourished the river of his development. Sabavala’s fortune to be able to tap that longed-for process of celebration of pantheistic luminosity, of the divine effulgence practitioner rather than a sponsor of the arts. He spent the organic growth which Jung has described as the marriage of before which the human must necessarily fade. In this shadowed years of World War II studying at Elphinstone consciousness and life. realisation lies the possibility that the exile and the pilgrim may College and the Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy School of Art in the recover the alchemical powers of healing and communion: it is city of his birth, and left for London as soon as the global Sabavala returned to Bombay from Paris in the early 1950s, then that the exile-pilgrim becomes the sorcerer. The lyrical conflict came to an end. He was 23, and his ambition was to exchanging a Europe recovering from World War II for an India tendency, apt by its nature to overflow, is modulated through become an actor. Once in London, he quickly realised that emerging from colonial rule. Having decided to conduct his The major breakthrough in Sabavala’s artistic development the stringent organising faculty that Sabavala brings to his painting, rather than theatre, was his true métier. He joined the artistic career in the newly independent Republic, he applied occurred in the mid-1960s, once he had begun to question the work: from this emerges the delicate beauty, at once intimate Heatherley School of Art to master the techniques of genre himself to modulating the universal languages of modernism value of his mannered improvisations within what I have and remote, of the winged horizons and deserted strands, the and the secrets of vision that the tradition of Western art that he had acquired, to convey the immediacies of his local elsewhere termed a ‘tropicalised Cubism’. Energies and distant cliffs and soundless waterfalls that so intrigue and offered; a few years later, he moved to Paris to study with context. On making this fundamental decision to return home, emotional impulses that had lain dormant in his consciousness captivate us, in Sabavala’s paintings. various teachers, the most important of them, for his he accepted the aesthetic concomitants attendant on it: he for several decades were released. The neat unfolding of his development, was the Cubist academician André Lhote. The took upon himself the project of self-renewal, of re-inventing images was disrupted by the sudden manifestation of the measured choreography of Sabavala’s figurative paintings and the self. Despite his pervasive sense of being an alien visionary landscape. In his magisterial canvases of the 1960s the exquisite mise-en-scene of his landscapes are the only everywhere, although at home in the world Sabavala has and 1970s, the Alpine lakes and Deccan scarp of his childhood, evidence pointing to his youthful fascination for the stage. always been proud of his Indian identity: he saw, at once, the Despite the primacy of landscape, the figure has persisted in the banks of the Tungabhadra that he had driven along, as well Sabavala’s art as an idealised archetype.